"As dimitre says xslt is much better at this class of problem than xquery"

"I hate to answer a request for a solution in language a by suggesting a solution in language b but what you are doing here falls into the class of problems which xslt handles much better than xquery"

"Saxon-ee supports streaming of large xml documents using xslt or xquery streaming is better supported in xslt than in xquery"

"But typically xslt is better for transforming xml into different xml formats on disk;xquery is better for more complex xml queries applications and when the xml is in a database"

"Xquery works better than xslt for this because it s more amenable to static analysis as it lacks the polymorphism of xslt s template rules"

"Xquery is more amenable to static analysis than xslt because it lacks the very dynamic template despatch mechanism"

If your output is going to be similar to your input with small changes then the xslt solution is often a lot simpler than the xquery solution

Xquery can produce a modified copy of your document but it s not particularly easy because you need to explicitly copy all the parts that you don t want to change;xslt is a better bet for producing a modified copy of the document

Xslt is significantly more appropriate to use than xquery for such kind of tasks

Xslt 2.0 and xquery 1.0 utilize xpath 2.0 which is what you are recognizing as xquery in the code above;the above code is xslt 2.0 not xquery

Unless you are using the static typing feature xquery is no more strongly typed than xslt

This kind of processing is most easily done with xslt which is more expressive than xquery

As for creating a sequence of attributes you can t do that in xpath which can t create new nodes you can however do that in xslt then you can use it elsewhere as in and will get xquery has a more compact syntax and in contrast to xpath allows expressions to create new nodes

My usual rule-of-thumb is that xquery is better than xslt for simple tasks whereas xslt is better for complex tasks

Generally i know it sounds banal xslt is better at transformation generating a new document from each source document while xquery is better at query extracting a small amount of information from each source document

As for whether to use xslt or xquery the proof is in the pudding xslt is better at transforms and xquery is better at queries

Setting a namespace as the default namespace might be useful though sadly in xquery this also makes a namespace the default namespace for the output - xslt does this better